


In Vino Veritas

by JustinianAugustus



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drinking, Earpcest, F/F, Greece, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Season 1, Sibling Incest, Sister/Sister Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 00:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20218792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustinianAugustus/pseuds/JustinianAugustus
Summary: On two continents, Wynonna and Waverly look to the past to figure out their future.





	In Vino Veritas

**WYNONNA**

If ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ existed, Athens Syndrome should have been a thing too. The first time you came in over the Argolid and saw the ancient city baking beneath you, something seized you. You were overwhelmed by the knowledge that this was where it all began — philosophy, democracy, all those polysyllabic words self-impressed men loved to throw around. These were the streets that Plato and Socrates once walked.

Thessaloniki was a different story. The first thing you noticed in Thessaloniki was how unbelievably hot it was, and after that, how the streets were full of beggars and urchins.

In most cities, the top of the hill was where rich people lived. In Thessaloniki, the top of the hill was a favela — a real shithole of decaying concrete skeletons and shanty-houses, not one of those picturesque hillside villages with whitewashed domes that you see in National Geographic. And beyond that, the city leveled off into a nameless neighborhood that would be at home in Afghanistan, where stray dogs barked all night and women with little icons would accost you in the street, muttering “_Agia Panagia Maria_” over and over again as if they could force you to understand Greek.

This was, of course, where Wynonna lived. And she did understand a little bit of Greek now, at least enough to know what the beggars’ mantra meant.

It was easy enough to understand: Pan-agia, Pan-demic, Pan-sexual, _Pan-soter_...  
Was that a word? ‘The savior of everything’, that’s what Wynonna was supposed to be. Not an alcoholic fuckup.

* * *

**WAVERLY**

Waverly fell in love with her sister before she even came back to Purgatory.

During her years learning about ancient cultures and languages, she was fascinated to find the idea of incest as a universal taboo was a myth. The old Persians claimed that folding together familial and romantic love sweetened both, and called this sacred act _xwēdōdah_.

There was a curious line on it in the Rivayats: “_all mankind would have known its own lineage and stock, never would a brother have been abandoned in love by his brother, nor a sister by her sister_”. At first she thought it was a translation error, but the original Middle Persian proved its accuracy. It was like a sermon sent straight to her from a medieval pulpit: _a sister abandoned in love by her sister_.

* * *

**WYNONNA**

Wynonna’s neighborhood wasn’t all bad. The drinks were cheaper than down in the tourist districts around Aristotle Square, and you didn’t have to watch fat retirees pass by endlessly on those pirate-themed booze cruises. Sometimes you could even get a bit of a breeze off the Thermaic gulf through the gaps in the city walls.

If you weren’t a historian or a cinephile, there was nothing to do in Thessaloniki except drink rakı until your throat begged for mercy.

Wynonna wasn’t a historian, but there was a story she learned in a civic museum that always amused her. In the early fifteenth century when the Ottomans were mopping up the last of the Byzantine Empire, the local Greek governor decided to just turn the city over to the Venetians in hope that they could better defend it. Just said — ‘fuck it, I’ll dump this problem on Italians because they seem to know what they’re doing’.

Wynonna felt like that was her life story. Not the thing about Italians, but that she needed someone else to shoulder the responsibilities her fucked-up parents had given her. Demons, curses, heirs, murders, padded rooms without keys… a little sister with no proper authority figure.

* * *

**WAVERLY**

Her dreams were haunted by images of Wynonna speaking a sultry, dripping language; her body painted black and gold and crowned with a Pharaonic headdress, chisel-carved from shimmering turquoise. Or fixed at the center of a faravahar, robed in spun emerald, hair matted with Achaemenid curls.

Half awake, half remembering, she’d repeat her name as a benediction: _Wynonna, Wynonna_...

_Wy_ as in... ‘why do I feel this way?’  
_No_ as in... ‘no, this isn’t right’  
_Nna_ as in… well... ‘nna’

She’d walked straight into an ethical minefield that few people outside Persepolis and Thebes had ever navigated. Maybe Purgatory was an exception, if Wynonna’s jokes were to be believed. Maybe everyone secretly crushed on their sisters here.

* * *

**WYNONNA**

Wynonna ran half a world away from Waverly, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about her. Every night at the strip club, every guy she went home with, every stumbling odyssey through the side streets and chapels to get back to her apartment, Waverly was there. Her smile was at the bottom of every bottle Wynonna finished. She was there in the scratched-out faces of Byzantine frescoes between jeweled perpendulia, in the sun itself as it rose behind the Chalkidiki in the summer. She could picture her in Imperial regalia, her skin radiating through purple silk like a starlight weft, each ringed finger more priceless than the last. She was calling out to her from across the Atlantic with the words of Solomon: _ἐκαρδίωσας ἡμᾶς, ἀδελφή μου νύμφη_.

_Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse._

* * *

**WAVERLY**

It wasn’t always cupcakes and puppies, for sure, growing up with someone so broken. Wynonna used to get mean when she drank before noon. Maybe leaving for Greece was a sort of atonement.

One time Wynonna came home so hammered you could smell the tequila and Jägerbombs from a yard away and they got to arguing and then to shoving and then there on the wall, like a raindrop, a lurid red smudge appeared.  
When Waverly looked at herself in the bathroom mirror a few minutes later, after Wynonna’s frantic apologies and tissues, Waverly thought this was the new normal. It was something in the spindles of blood unfurling over her lips and chin and fingerprinted across her cheeks from the prods of her nursing hands. It was raw, visceral, coppery, mesmerizing. It was Wynonna.

* * *

**WYNONNA**

Walking back from these Greek dive bars was torture. Not at all like drunk driving through Purgatory with Waverly dozing in the passenger seat after a long school day, so fragile and perfect.

Back in Purgatory Wynonna had collected DUIs like cereal-box promotionals. Nedly finally suspended her license after that time she got into the wrong car in the wrong seat and then passed out wondering why there was no wheel. But as long as she didn’t fall asleep in a field, walking home from Shorty’s was heavenly compared to this — the fireflies, the smell of woodsmoke on backroads, watching her shadow unfold after each streetlamp and then taper off to nothing...

* * *

**WAVERLY**

Wynonna had once said her favorite thing about Waverly was that Waverly still loved her despite having a million reasons to hate her. To Waverly that was just what being a sister meant. You forgave each other no matter what.

Who else could understand what it was like to live in mortal fear of your own father — at every loud noise wondering if this was it, the murder-suicide had finally come and she’d never see her mom again. Who else could understand how you could still love him, still be devastated by his death, after living like that.

It all made perfect sense, didn’t it? Grow up with daddy and mommy issues out the wazoo, and you’d latch romantically onto the only pillar in your life, even if it was your sister.

* * *

**WYNONNA**

Waverly was always the sharp and motivated one. At the same time that Wynonna was almost disowned by Gus and Curtis for another pregnancy scare, ten-year-old Waverly had straight A’s and could say six whole sentences in Spanish. She’d love it here. She’d try to talk to the locals in Ancient Greek and then blush when they couldn’t understand a word of it. She’d know an _Eleusa_ from a _Hodegetria_.

And when Wynonna was a fucking mess with chronically chapped lips and legs she hadn’t shaved in weeks, Waverly wouldn’t care, she’d kiss her anyways. She’d kiss her and then dance with her in her shitty apartment with no AC until the floorboards sung and all the empty beer bottles rang like struck bowling pins.

Getting so drunk you kissed your sister was the holy grail of barroom stories. Enjoying it — savoring it — was another thing entirely. Somehow Wynonna knew it would happen if Waverly were here in Macedon.

If only she could just kiss her and pass this whole ‘heir’ thing over to her too. Fuck it, let her deal with it.

* * *

**WAVERLY**

When Wynonna finally strolled back into town after three years, Waverly was way past indulging in angst.

_Wow, you’ve grown out your… hair._

No surprise that Wynonna was too far gone to care about those boring old Levitical laws that said you couldn’t bang your sister. They did things one way in Greece, but up in the foothills of the Rockies, sexual pressure was so low it could boil on a single sly look.

Once it started boiling, every morning (at least when Wynonna didn’t sleep till afternoon) Waverly would wake up trapped in in a thick auburn forest while her sister kissed her from above, hair smelling like sunflower and cheap IPAs. At night they’d listen to Liz Phair records under checkerboard quilts by the fire pit, not caring how loud they played because there wasn’t a soul in miles, or how badly they sang along:

_Every time I see your face I think of things not pure and chaste…_

Wynonna was never a scholar, but her kisses were more eloquent than Cicero and her moans were sweeter than poetry. There was nothing sexier than the way she’d shake all the superfluous syllables off her speech with each shot of whiskey until it was a comfortable slur, then mumble old memories as they spooned.

* * *

**WYNONNA**

Usually Wynonna was the big spoon, but when she felt vulnerable they switched up, even if the size difference made things a bit awkward.


End file.
